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Hygiene aesthetics on London’s gay scene: the stigma of AIDS Johan Andersson, Department of Geography, University College London (Reino Unido) This paper explores how stereotypical notions of gay venues as corrupting spaces, primarily derived from cinema, were recycled in media representations of London’s gay scene in the 1980s in the reporting of a number of high profile gay murders and the outbreak of AIDS. These media representations stigmatized London’s gay venues as dangerous and contagious spaces associated with violent crime and sexual disease. The architectural features of gay pubs at the time, which tended to be dark spaces with discreet entrances and exteriors, came to symbolize an unhealthy and hidden subculture associated with sexual contamination. This paper suggests that the emergence of a new type of gay venue in the early 1990s, characterized by open-fronted facades, minimalist interior design and natural light, can be read as a commercial response to this earlier stigmatization. In particular, the use of hygiene aesthetics and certain forms of aesthetic labour were effective attempts to rid the commercial gay scene of some of its unhealthy connotations in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Drawing on the anthropologist Mary Douglas influential theory of dirt and the architectural historian Adrian Forty’s application of this theory to design history, this paper looks the interior design of Soho’s gay bars and their emphasis on hygiene aesthetics as a response to contemporary anxieties about homosexuality and AIDS. Gay men were increasingly visible, but this visibility was restricted to the sanitised spaces of the new gay economy, which seemed to protect society at large from the contamination associated with an earlier homosexual subculture. Douglas, M. (1970) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Forty,
A. (1986) Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750, London: Thames
and Hudson. |
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